Arlene Lillian Hanson

Arlene Lillian Hanson

Owing to the divorce of my mother and father, and the fact that my mother was probably twenty-three years old, we fell into the safety net of living with my maternal grandparents, known to everyone as Lill and Lee. 

Grandma Lill became as much a mother to me as her daughter was.  We lived in the house on Cottage Street in Sparta as if nothing had happened.  I was simply added to the four children they already were raising.  My mother had studied to become a typist and secretary and likely had sporadic employment and I would not be surprised if much of it was at Camp McCoy, the nearby army base.

We are in the year 1949 now and I am two years old plus.  I have considerably more memories but they are still fragmented.  The cottage street house was on a corner, across from a park that consumed an entire block.  The park was largely green lawn space, but in one quadrant was a small cannon, placed there as a memorial.  The street was unpaved then but there were some sidewalks, and I can clearly remember riding a little tricycle up and down the sidewalk.  I played and rode the trike barefooted because I can remember looking down at my feet on the pedals and seeing that my big toe was bleeding.  I had stubbed it on the concrete while pedaling.  I went crying into the house to show Grandma Lill.

Grandpa Lee, my mother, and her sisters smoked cigarettes at times and I had seen them use book matches.  I can remember finding a partially used book of matches in the dirt street while playing.  I removed a match and rubbed it on the scratcher, holding it tight to get a good enough grip on it to move it.  It flared alight and burned my finger.  I went crying into the house to show Grandma Lill.

Arlene Lillian Hanson was born in Westby, Wisconsin, about twenty five miles south of Sparta and up on the ridge.  She had three sisters and a brother.  Her family lived in a valley north of Westby, down in a valley through which a creek ran.  I have been to the location many times, but there is no  house or farm building left from her time there.  In fact, the family fled the house in a flood and ran up the hillside.  I do not know if it was destroyed and relocated or if they just mitigated the damage and kept on living at the original site.

In recent years the site has become developed as a religious retreat and church camp called "Living Waters."

She attended school through the eighth grade, after which, she went to La Crosse and attended "normal school" which prepared her to become a teacher.  I believe she and grandpa Lee were already sweethearts by then.  She returned and taught school in Bloomingdale, hiking or using a horse drawn sleigh to go "cross country" to the little one-room school across the fields and light the fire so that the little building was warmed before the children arrived.  She and grandpa Lee courted and I believe that the rules for teachers meant that she had to be single and not dating, so the teaching probably ended when she and Lee got serious.

Grandpa Lee had taken work in Sparta, some fifteen or twenty miles away and they bought the house on Cottage Street to raise their family in.  I have surprisingly many memories of that house.  I remember the kitchen, which had a door to the back yard and I remember toddling in and asking her for a cookie or a drink of water.  There was a little tree in the back yard which grew hundreds of little miniature apples about the size of a marble.  They were bitter and inedible but I would not be surprised to learn that she made jelly or sauce out of them nonetheless.

They must have been having trouble toilet-training me, because I can remember my mother, having talked to the doctor, placing a piece of tag board on the inside of the cupboard door in that kitchen.  When I would have a good day, I would get a little colored star to stick on the tag board.  I can remember being enthusiastic about the stars.  They were in a little box, like a match box, up on a shelf inside the cupboard.  I can't remember actually equating the stars with any behavior on my part, but I do remember climbing up on the counter top, opening the cupboard door, and getting into the little box.  I licked and stuck all the stars on the tag board.

Lill and Lee had a thin metal kettle which was filled almost to the brim with used sundry items, like nuts, bolts, nails, pieces of wire, thumb tacks, upholstery tacks, and the like which just couldn't be thrown away because, of course, they would be needed at some time.  I know this is true, because I have always had a similar stash of items just like them that I simply could not throw away.

I have a clear memory of sitting at the little kitchen table watching my uncle paw through the little kettle looking for a nut or a bolt that he needed.  He would pile little items that were in the way of his search on the table.  One item was an electrical plug, the kind that could replace a broken one on the end of a lamp cord.  It had no wire, just the prongs, and I picked it up and promptly plugged it into the electrical outlet above the table.

Sparks and blue flames started flying out of it, startling my uncle who was a high school kid at the time.  The little connections within must have been just close enough for the current to arc between them but not so close as to allow an absolute short, which would just have blown the fuse.  I remember him gingerly grasping the plug and pulling it out of the wall before admonishing me not to do anything like that again.

I didn't pay any attention to his advice, of course, and continued fooling around with outlets from time to time until I pressed my sweaty thumb up against one and got a paralyzing jolt which not only hurt but frightened the daylights out of me.  I gave them a wide berth after that.  Life lesson learned.

I remember fondly the occasional evening event of that magical treat, popcorn.  My uncle seemed to be the best at making it.  He used a lot of butter.  Everyone would be listening to the radio and out would come this big yellow bowl, the biggest one grandma Lill had, full of popcorn.  Everyone raced to get the top part  because it had the most butter.  I can remember sitting on the bowl once it was half empty, opening and closing my legs to allow people to grab handfuls of the popcorn.  They were howling with laughter but my uncle thought it not so funny. 

I can remember him lifting me off the bowl, shaking his head, and saying, "not a good idea."

The little cannon in the park was a fascination because, if I got someone to lift me up I could stick my face right into the bore and feel its coolness and see its darkness.  The cannon is still there and, on a bike ride this past summer, I realized that a commemorative marker had been placed next to it with some explanatory information.

The cannon was captured at the battle of Vicksburg, Mississippi during the Civil War and brought back by one of the Wisconsin Divisions.  My great, great grandfather Peter Hanson was in that battle and would have been in the outfit that captured it and brought it back.  I don't think that anyone in my family knew this!  How ironic that this soldier's great-great-grandson would be sticking his head into that cannon!

The real attraction, however, for an obsessive-compulsive toddler, was in the basement of the house.  Once down the wooden stairs, I navigated my way through the dark, spider-infested shelves holding Grandma Lill's canned vegetables and fruits to the front corner where, beneath a dirty, miniature window was the greatest mystery in the world.  It was a metal case with a thick glass front and inside were all these little clock-faces with tiny little hands.  One of the hands was nearly always moving and rarely stopped near the little numbers.  Another of the little hands was clearly moving, but at a much slower pace.  Two or three more didn't appear to be moving at all, but if I stayed there watching long enough, they were! 

I don't recall ever wondering how Grandpa Lee's car worked, or the refrigerator, or the radio, but this little device, hidden away where my aunts and uncle didn't even know it existed, was truly baffling, and I could sit there on a couple of peach crates and watch it for tens of minutes, wondering what the heck it was.  It was, of course, just the water meter, but it kindled a curiosity in me and probably had a lot to do with making me the kind of kook that I am, always charting things and analyzing things.